Joe
Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly
Briefed Investors Privately
4:58
Former Vice President Joe Biden went to great lengths to boost
his son-in-law’s health care company while in the White House, briefing
investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access to the Oval Office.
The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse
of Power by America’s Progressive Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at
Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In June 2011, Biden arranged a
private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack
Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been
around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let
alone develop a website.
The meeting was all the more
surprising since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for
health care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the
nation’s commander-in-chief.
“Their status as a health care
incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles
in Corruption. “In fact, there were thirty-one similar companies
operating in the state of California alone, and another eleven in the state of
New York.”
As Schweizer outlines, the only
significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was
that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter,
Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an
integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the
family in June 2012.
One day after StartUp Health’s
executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost
from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference
put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company
managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains
unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.
Regardless, the back-to-back events
gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the
health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that
StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s
co-founders succinctly put it.
The former vice president’s efforts
on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles
in Corruption details, Biden went out of his way to ensure
StartUp Health executives were given unparalleled access to the White House
during the Obama presidency. The company’s leadership, which mostly consisted
of Krein’s family and friends, frequently met with administration officials not
only in private but also in public.
“According to 2011 White House
visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House
Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His
brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”
Biden’s efforts on behalf of the
company expansively increased during his final year in office, both
internationally and at home.
First, the vice president took Krein
with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope
Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.
“Conference attendees included a
who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,”
Schweizer notes.
Then in May, Krein was tasked with
introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted
by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the
company as it planned to expand its portfolio.
In October 2016, Biden appeared
alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation
Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the
health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the
battle against cancer.
Apart from arranging access and
touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the
Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017,
Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted
by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp
Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.
Ironically, at the same time he was
working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his
children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.
“I wish my kids would become
wealthy,” Biden told the
International Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the
economic policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Profile in
Corruption outlines how Biden’s children
and other members of his family did just that while he was in political office.
FEINSTEIN
HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS
THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS
AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT
OUT THERE!
IN THE
November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And
so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior
of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own
ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an
incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red
China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Senator
Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President
Win
McNamee/Getty Images
9 Oct 20192,419
5:44
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his
statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in
Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard
working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s
presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business
dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s
endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not
investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private
equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President
Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest
RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding
BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior
contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political
Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter
Biden inked the multibillion-dollar deal that created BHR with a subsidiary of
the state-owned Bank of China in 2013.
The timing of the lucrative deal has
been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China
with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president
was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South
China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March
2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight,
however, Schweizer detailed the political machinations that preceded Hunter
Biden’s $1.5 billion venture with China:
In December of 2013, Vice President
Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a
visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have
just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They
basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese
approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly
controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely
criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging
them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested
heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of
June, Hunter Biden was still involved with BHR,
sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund
estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of
politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the
Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the
senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San
Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the
newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by
establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and
Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in
which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the
country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein
and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In
1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later
ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated
several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those
firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum reportedly
had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by Shanghai Pacific
Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as
being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent
most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband
having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator
as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry
of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather
information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices.
Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already
been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a
liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed
against him,” Politico reported in 2018,
speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and
not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of
the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement
also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a
fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the
Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president.
Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since
her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the
Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the
notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is
that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California,
having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address
any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the
senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how
his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”
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